Up Cloze and Personal

One of the most popular activities in schools for developing reading comprehension, is what is known as ‘cloze procedure’, where students are given a piece of written text with a number of words deleted, and using the context clues and their knowledge of syntax, they have to decide on the most appropriate words to fit in the spaces. Most teachers of literacy are familiar with the idea, but I wonder how many realise that the term ‘cloze’ derives from ‘closure’, comes from the Gestalt theory of the psychology of the brain – often described in simple terms as ‘the whole being greater than the sum of its parts’ – and dates back to 1953.

Until now it has been time-consuming to construct these exercises, but not any more, thanks to the ingenious Cloze Test Creator, which allows you to create your own cloze reading texts in minutes, and gives you the flexibility of deleting the kind of words you want to test. I am indebted to Aniya (aka The English Teacher) for bringing this to my attention, and to Jeffrey Hill, an English teacher at the Normandy Business School in Le Havre, from whose wonderful The English Blog I unashamedly ‘borrowed’ it. Watch this short video tutorial and you will see how simple it is.

Hi Bill,
I’ve watched this and thought about it, and I’m not sure what this is assessing. I can see the attraction of course, but summary completion is hard for very good reasons. Does this assess reading comprehension, summarising, …?

Hi Gordon,
Good question. I know this sounds a bit perverse, but although it is called a ‘test’ creator I didn’t think of it in terms of assessment but as a discussion tool, to use for example if you wanted to discuss with kids the role of verbs or adjectives in a sentence. Obviously, having had the discussion you might then provide a ‘test’ so that they can demonstrate understanding. I wouldn’t use it often and I wouldn’t use it as a high-level strategy for developing reading comprehension.